1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates generally to data storage. More particularly, the present invention relates to media file storage.
2. Background Art
Consumers enjoy the freedom of playing their favorite media files on a wide variety of devices obtained from many different distribution channels. Media distribution services may allow consumers to download or stream media content from mobile phones, portable media players, videogame consoles, personal computers, set top boxes, and a myriad of other devices. Physical media remains prevalent as well, having certain advantages over digital distribution. Instant playback availability, high quality encoding, simplicity of use, and pride of ownership still provide compelling reasons for consumers to continue collecting physical media of their favorite programming.
However, all these varied platforms and devices may offer different display resolutions, compression codecs, bandwidth limitations, and other factors that need to be taken into account. Thus, content producers must typically produce specialized versions of an originally encoded master file, sometimes referred to as a mezzanine file, to create media files suitable for particular distribution channels, such as download services or physical media. The originally encoded master file might comprise uncompressed video data in RGB, RGBA, YUY2, YV12, or other color-spaces. The uncompressed video data might be further compressed with a lossless codec such as Huffyuv. Alternatively, by suffering minor quality degradation for substantial storage savings, a lossy but very high bitrate production codec such as MPEG 50i can be used instead. The video data could be contained in a number of different media container formats with embedded audio, such as AVI (Audio Video Interleave), MP4 (MPEG-4 Part 14), or MKV (Matroska). Once the originally encoded master file is suitably prepared, the specialized versions are produced by transcoding or decoding/re-encoding the master file to conform to the particular requirements of the specific distribution channel, such as maximum video and audio bit-rates or specific video resolutions.
Once these specialized or transcoded versions are generated, they generally require quality assurance checking to ensure that the final result is acceptable to human perception. In other words, assurance that the video and audio quality is satisfactory given the parameters of the distribution channel, free of glaring compression artifacts or other anomalies that may cause consumer dissatisfaction. Generally, this quality assurance testing is a manual process consuming valuable resources that might be otherwise put to more productive uses.
As a result, it might be helpful to store reference copies of transcoded videos already known to be quality assured to avoid duplicative quality assurance testing. However, this approach tends to consume large amounts of storage space, particularly when numerous distribution channels must be catered to. Although storage technologies continue to advance in capacity, they have generally not improved proportionally to swift advances in processing power. Moreover, highly reliable archival storage remains a difficult goal to achieve in a cost effective manner using present technology. Thus, it may be desirable to favor using computational resources rather than storage resources to minimize operating costs.
Accordingly, there is a need to overcome the drawbacks and deficiencies in the art by providing a way to ensure quality assured media file storage for transcoded media files without requiring a large storage footprint.